In three years, I will be a century old. “A hundred years old” has a thinner sound than “a century old.” The word “century” peals with the thunder of cathedral bells. I feel my life deserves the tolling of ancient bells.
As the milestone nears, I visualize my body telling my brain it has carried me for a lifetime and is beginning to tire. Just a year ago, my body was fit enough to compete in a series of three-mile races. Now it struggles to lift me from a chair.
My body insists it’s time for my brain to do more of the heavy lifting. My mind leapt at the opportunity and has begun to guide me along the path it wants me to follow. My body competed: running, laboring through Army obstacle courses, contending for university honors, vying with associates for the corner office on the highest floor.
My mind feels no need to compete. It is drawing me into the stillness within me where I hear its voce telling me to leave winning or losing behind. I might now miss a day of exercise, but I never fail to meditate.
I honor the body that has carried me all these years, but in moments of uncertainty I now turn to my mind. I hear it telling me the path ahead is walked with love, gratitude, kindness and tranquility. I listen and go gently, feeling no need to hurry to some finish line.
It took a Buddhist Retreat to awaken me to the joy of walking slowly through the beauty surrounding me. At the Retreat, we walked silently through a vast Asian garden, vibrant with generations of foliage brought from distant places to grace our world. It’s amazing how much beauty one sees on a slow walk.
I remain bonded to my family, but now reach out much more often to friends at their painful moments. I know enough about loss to realize there are no words to soften anguish. But, I stay close to friends burdened by illness or grief so they know I’m there if they need me.
As I become one of the oldest of the very old, it’s tempting to expect grandchildren and great-grandchildren to come to visit me rather than flying across the country to them. But, I’ve waited on airport lines behind young families, marveling at the accessories they must travel with. I can’t lift my bag into the overhead, but someone always helps and I make the six-hour crossing where four generations embrace.
Guided more by my mind than by my body has changed the way I respond to the river of thoughts and emotions flowing around me. Insults, imagined or real, that once angered me, now drift past. I recall the torrent of energy I wasted wearing a jacket heavy with guilt, resentment and regret. I’ve discarded that jacket and feel so much lighter in body and mind.
Each of us must find their own path through old age. Mine has taken me deep within where I feel the presence of my soul. Not far from 97, I realize much is happening to me over which I have little control. My shoulders are gripped by arthritis. My legs—once pumping ramrods—no longer carry me more than two miles. I strain to hear even wearing state of the art hearing aids. But there are choices I can still make.
Virtually all those choices are not made outside, but within me where my mind and soul touch and guide me along the path they want me to follow. There was a moment long ago that would have made me a trespasser on that path. When I was in the fourth grade, my teacher said “A Jew spit on the sidewalk and nearly hit my shoe!” She then glared at me—the only Jew in the class—and said, “I’ll fix you; you little Christ Killer!”
A special needs boy and I were the only two children who were not promoted to fifth grade. My parents—their spirits crushed by poverty—blamed me, saying I must have done something terribly wrong.
Why the ten-year-old boy refused to allow his spirits to be crushed eludes me. Perhaps in that moment he knew he was alone and would have only himself to count on.
This I do know, a very long time ago a little boy found the courage to take the first hesitant steps along the path I’ve followed for nearly a century. Sometimes, when I listen, I hear the cathedral bells that toll only for heroes. The courage of that little boy made me worthy of becoming my own hero. Bob’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle and in Next Avenue, the publication of the Public Broadcasting Service. His book, “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?” was published by McGraw Hill and is in five languages.
